|
|
 |
|
|||||
|
Thanks so much for your emails and letters about what your group is discussing. We've had great fun reading them, and we hope you will, too. Please continue to tell us what your group is doing! Congratulations to Linda and her Food for Thought Book Club in Columbia, Maryland, for winning the first random drawing of the Discussible Book Choices Contest “Our Food for Thought Book Club has had a tough year – several of us have had major and minor surgery, several are having ongoing stress with aging/ill parents, and most of us have had lots of stresses at work. The result is that we’ve selected a “mixed bag” of fun and serious books for this coming year. Tonight, for instance, around a friend’s pool, we’re eating pizza and discussing Angry Housewives Eating Bonbons, and, in a few months, in someone’s dining room, The Hot Flash Club and Killer Pancakes (Diane Mott Davison). We’re balancing those lighter books out with Death Comes for the Archbishop and Jan de Hartog’s Peaceable Kingdom. After several years of having everyone read the same book and discuss it, we’re branching out by having a “Biography Night” and a “Classic-I-Haven’t-Read-Before-Night” in which each woman chooses her own. We’re also doing some nonfiction this year, in the form of Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies. We seldom do nonfiction books, it seems, the exception being Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting by in America, which was a real eye-opener for all of us this past year. One of our all-time favorite books over the last few years (and one which generated much discussion) was The Bonesetter’s Daughter, by Amy Tan. Other popular choices: Life of Pi, Secret Life of Bees, and Blessings." --Linda, Food for Thought Book Club, Columbia, MD More Discussible Book Choices Our book club just finished reading A Year Of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks.We are reading for September Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden. I have just signed our group, Melon Sisters up with your site. We have been active for a year now. We are all school teachers and love reading, so we thought to join and discuss also. We have some great discussions. The book we just finish was Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros. We had a wonderful discussion, being that many of our members are hispanic. This made for some lively thoughts, about culture and how it shapes us. Is it only culture? Our next book is Teacher Man by Frank McCourt. This, too, should be lively ... being we are all teachers from a high at risk school.
Thank you for the Reading Group Choices that we purchase each year. I've found some great books to read. The Woman in Me 2002 Book Club is reading Meeting Mrs. Right by Richard Jeanty for the month of August. AAUW Booklovers groups are reading The Glass Castle by Jeannette Wall For the month of August, we are reading The Bright Forever by Lee Martin. I am in two book clubs.One book club is reading The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi by Jacqueline Park. This is an excellent novel about Italy during the Renaissance. It is very well written and researched. I loved this novel and couldn't put it down. My other book group is reading Watership Down by Richard Adams. I am not sure if I like it yet, as I am only 100 pages into it. But I am learning a lot about rabbits - that is for sure. It is also very well researched. Our book club is reading Empress Orchid by Anchee Min for the month of August. We love books with strong female characters! We just finished reading and discussing Running With Scissors. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez, Gabriel Our group just selected March, by Geraldine Brooks for our next discussion scheduled for August 25. Some of us had read and enjoyed Year of Wonders by this author and knew this would be an exceptional book, especially since it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. A reading group formed this summer by teachers at Shearer School in Napa, California has selected to read The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd. It appears to be an excellent selection for our diverse group in ages and backgrounds. We are learning through our discussions that we have a lot more in common than just our love of reading and chosen profession. This month our reading group, The Reading Circle, is reading The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman. Book group is well under way, and I believe I need to add additional times as well. Hooray! In June, we read The History of Love, July was The Mercy of Thin Air, August is The Memory Keeper's Daughter and September will be The Devil in the White City. Next month we are reading The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson. Best book by far this year: Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. For the month of July my book club, The Book Club, read My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult. Her books are excellent for book club discussions, because there are underlying "moral" issues in almost every one. She is a great Book Club Author. One of my book clubs just read The View from Delphi by Jonathan Odell. It was also the "One Book One Community" read for this area. It was a great discussion, and we are looking forward to the author coming on August 8. Our September read is The Work of Wolves by Kent Meyers. The other book club read The Glass Castle by Jeannette Wall, and next month is reading Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. I am currently in 2 groups. We just did Wicked by Gregory Maguire in one, and the choice is Anita Diamant's The Last Days of Dogtown. In the other we did Steve Berry's The Templar Legacy, and next month is Stephen Carter's The Emperor of Ocean Park. The first group is all women and the second is mixed. I have been in the first group for 23 years and we are quite close. June - Snow Flower and the Secret Fan Some of our favorite books from the last year are: In the Time of Butterflies, One Thousand White Women, With, The Known World, The Tortilla Curtain, Gonzalez and Daughter Trucking Company ,The Kite Runner, The Golden Chamber. All of these books struck lively discussion, sometimes researched on the participant's part, and evoked many memories and side stories - the best part of learning for our group. My 26-year-old daughter is starting her own book group in Kansas and is using some of these books to begin. For September, we are reading Small Island by Andrea Lev. I'm always interested in what other groups are reading. My Book Group (the Millennium Book Group, Boulder, CO) is reading In the Lake of the Wood" by Tim O'Brien for August. We like to read books which make for a good discussion, and I think this book will. For July we read Letters from Paraguay by Lily Tuck. It was a good read, but we all felt it was a little shallow. The Seneca East Public Library Book Discussion Group in Attica, Ohio is reading When All Is Said and Done by Robert Hill. The Brown Bag Book Group is reading Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden. Yes, it’s an old standard for groups, but we take our time choosing titles. We just finished discussing our July selection The 5 People You Meet In Heaven. In August, we are reading The Cloud Atlas. Our faculty book club will be reading Marley and Me. Over the summer, we have tried a number of approaches, since we don't usually meet in July and August. Last year, we picked an author (Elizabeth Berg). The task was to read at least one of her books with some of us reading 7 or 8. Then we discussed her writing style, themes, characters, etc. For this year, we picked a 'theme'. The task is to read at least one fiction and one non-fiction book about the American civil war. (We are in Canada.) I think Gone with the Wind is going to be a popular choice, and I know a couple of people were interested in a biography of Abraham Lincoln. This has been an interesting way to leave things fairly unstructured but still have something to discuss when we meet in September. I'd recommend it! I'd also recommend Widow of the South - very interesting Civil War fiction! We will be reading My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult for our September book club meeting. It is a most compelling story ... with tons of good moral and ethical discussions to take place. I read it several months ago and have selected this for our fall meeting end of September. All of us being mothers in our group, I think the group won't be able to put this page-turner down! I belong to three reading groups, with some members overlapping between groups. I am a semi-retired librarian. By "semi-retired" I mean I relinquished all my duties except one - my book group. I started my group at the request of the director. This was well over ten years ago. I have lost track. Years come and go. We are reading what I call our summer read. We will meet again in September. Summer read is Ursula, Under, by Ingrid Hill. This past season, we also read To Kill a Mockingbird, The DaVinci Code, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, to name a few. A favorite was The Secret Life of Bees. I enjoy Reading Group Choices. Here's the reading list for the Whittier Unitarian Women's Book Group, from Whittier California. We've been reading together since 1995, and read only literary fiction. I was inspired by my sister-in-law from Salem, Oregon to organize a group of like-minded women who enjoyed reading and wanted to discuss what they'd read with others. We started out with about 15 women, mostly friends from the local Unitarian church, though our local book store led a couple of others to us. One of them is still with us today. We've lost a few members over the years as people retired and moved away, but we've always had a rather open policy, and friends of group members have added to our numbers and diversity. We range in age from about 40 to 70+.Many of us are or have been teachers, but we have a couple of nurses, a dietitian, a former glass-blower, a mother of 11 (and grandmother of many) a retired parks employee and gardener, a developer for a cosmetic company, and a rehabilitation counselor. Our mailing list has grown to about 50 women, including "emeritus" members who have moved away, but still share reading lists from their book groups. Our active membership is perhaps 20-25, with 12 to 15 members attending any given meeting, depending on their schedules and the book. We meet at one member's house for most of the year, and while she's on vacation, we meet at my house. We read a book a month every month but December, when we read about 5 selected short stories, drink eggnog and sample cookies from our annual cookie exchange. Otherwise, we don't eat together, but devote our meetings to discussion, digression and lots of laughter. Some of our highlights over the years have included conference calls with several authors (thanks to HarperCollins), with Sena Jeter Naslund and her book Ahab's Wife a universal favorite. We were thrilled to have author and poet Carol Muske Dukes join us in person to discuss her book Life After Death. We've gone to see books-into-movies together, and on outings to hear authors speak at local bookstores and other venues. We celebrated our tenth anniversary with a potluck and a collective list of top and bottom ten books over the past ten years. You can imagine the discussion that engendered! I've been told that one reason we've been together so long is that I order books for the next month's meeting and distribute and collect money for them at the current month's meeting. It just takes the hassle out of finding books for all of our busy members. But the thing that really keeps us going is our love for reading and our attachment to each other. This is probably more information than you wanted, but I had to take the opportunity to tell you about our wonderful group.
|
 |
||
|
||
 |